Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [232]
Boaz was let in, but without his tape recorder. A guard took him outside the Administration Building and they walked in the November air about a hundred yards over to Maximum Security, one ugly squat building by itself. There Boaz was put in a fairly large visiting room, maybe 40 by 25, with only a guard in a bulletproof glass cage to keep an eye on him. That guard was controlling the door to get in and out, but probably couldn't hear much inside his booth. He was half asleep. Stupor on top of old woe was the sad vibration Dennis was getting from Maximum.
Dennis's first impression was that an intelligence had just come into the room. Gilmore showed a quiet in-drawn face. Dennis thought he might not have noticed him on the street unless they made eye contact. Gilmore had smoky gray-blue eyes with a lot of light in them.
Startling. A direct clear gaze. Since he was wearing the loose white coveralls of Maximum Security, and had come into the room barefoot, Dennis could see him as a holy man in New Delhi.
They got off to a good start. Boaz laid an awful lot down real fast.
Told of his law background, Boalt Hall at Berkeley-Gary's nod showed he knew these were worthy credentials-and of the time he had put in as assistant prosecutor in the D.A.'s office of Contra Costa County a little northwest of San Francisco. He had been a pot-smoking prosecutor, he made a point of telling Gary. While he had dealt in the punitive side of the law, his sympathies were more to the defense.
That was probably because of listening to Ginsberg and Kerouac back in the late fifties when just a college freshman-he and Gilmore must be about the same age, they agreed-and then later giving his sympathies to people like Mario Savio, Jerry Rubin, and the Berkeley movement in general. He pinpointed his life with these names-Gilmore knew the names.
Lately, he had not practiced much law, Boaz said. Too restricting.
He was interested more in the consciousness movement, encounter groups, meditation, Sufi, the process called Fischer-Hoffman. He had come out of that process so moved by the transformations in himself that he became a Fischer-Hoffman counselor. Still he came to find that restricting. So, in his mind at least, he had moved on to Findhorn. He liked the idea that there was a place where twenty-pound cabbages could be grown in an inch of topsoil way up in Scotland, and even flowers could bloom in the winter through your attunement to the plants and your ability to guide the energies as they came down.
Gilmore took it all in, and came back with good questions. Boaz was kind of blown out of it. Gilmore was offering the best intellectual conversation he'd had since coming to Salt Lake City. Bizarre.
They were rapping about books, a fast heavy rap, and Gary was talking about Demian by Hermann Hesse, and Catchuz, Ken Kesey, Alan Watts, Death in Venice. He called the author Tom Mann, and said, "the pretty boy knocked me out." Finally he said, "I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote." It wasn't so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life by Irving Stone.
Dennis wasn't hearing ideas that were new to him, hell, by comparison to most, he was pretty cultivated in these matters even if, by his own measure, a dilettante. Still he was conversant, and so was impressed that Gilmore was actually this familiar with the consciousness stuff. While, essentially, Gary had nothing new to contribute, still he had done a good deal of thinking on the subject. "You cannot escape yourself," Gilmore said. "You have to meet yourself."
Dennis was all for that. You were responsible for your actions.
But he thought Gilmore was a little dogmatic about reincarnation. In that area, Boaz had no intense belief himself-reincarnation was just one possibility among others. "Look, Gary," he